The Continuing Crisis

May was put to death by the Dow Jones industrial average, which sank into the red for the year after the third straight monthly jobs report of poor growth (69,000 net new jobs), a downward adjustment in Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter to 1.9 percent, and word that President Barack Obama still will not retire. The month began with President Obama losing 41 percent of the West Virginia primary vote to Mr. Keith Judd, an inmate in the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, who wears a foot-long mullet and is serving 210 months for extortion, and ended with someone by the name of Mr. John Wolfe grabbing 42 percent of the vote in Arkansas’ Democratic primary. Mr. Obama got 58 percent, but then Mr. Judd was not running in Arkansas. The American electorate seems to fear the economy is resiling into recession, and, we shall pronounce again, the November 6 presidential election will be a mere formality. As I have prognosticated in my new book, The Death of Liberalism, Mr. Mitt Romney will be elected president in the autumn, and Mr. Obama will be raising funds for his presidential library to be built in Blue Island, Illinois.

In Egyptian election news, Mr. Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood inched past former air force general Ahmed Shafiq with 25 percent of the vote to force a runoff with the former prime minister in June. Shortly thereafter the erstwhile Egyptian strongman Mr. Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life imprisonment for the deaths of hundreds of protesters during the fabulous Arab Spring. Mr. Mubarak, 84, is bedridden, so his incarceration ought not to cost a lot of money, and security will be minimal. And in further Egyptian political news, the Islamist-dominated parliament has been ensnared in a terrible controversy over an alleged proposal to allow Egyptian husbands legally to enjoy sexual intercourse with their deceased wives for up to six hours after death. Egyptian women have never been firecrackers in bed, but this proposal is ridiculous, and to secular Egyptian critics it is decidedly unhygienic. They snicker at the socalled “farewell intercourse,” ha ha. Yet in May 2011 an illustrious Moroccan cleric, the Rev. Zamzami Abdul Bari, asseverated that a marriage remains valid even after death, and he even extended to Islamic women post-expiry conjugal rights with their stone-cold husbands, so long as they are polite. The controversy simmers.

In Syria, government forces abetted by militiamen continued their peacekeeping missions, ending the month with the killing of more than 100 women and children in the town of Houla, an action that elicited a rare United Nations Security Council resolution denouncing the deaths, and then it was off to lunch. In Johannesburg, South Africa, Mrs. Karin Bennett’s cat survived a tumble in her washing machine, during which the absent-minded Mrs. Bennett looked high and low for the pet. Fortunately, when the machine’s one-hour-and-45-minute cycle ended, she found the cat, Tabitha, meowing from behind the machine’s glass window and spotlessly clean. In Victoria, British Columbia, an excitable neighbor called 911 when she heard painful utterances and much violent pothering from a nearby house—only to be informed by deputies, who had rushed to the house with guns at the ready, that, as deputy police chief John Ducker attested, “when questioned about the amount of noise he was making, the [woman’s neighbor] explained that he had been essentially on the toilet….” The cops had a good laugh.

Britain’s Supreme Court adjudged that Mr. Julian Assange, the lovelorn founder of WikiLeaks, be extradited to Sweden, where he faces the complaints of at least two irate women who claim he raped them before leaking a vast amount of American intelligence. Ms. Elizabeth Warren, the embattled Harvard State University professor whose dubious claim to being 1/32 Native American allowed her to assert minority status at the university, is engulfed in still more controversies. The Boston radio host Mr. Howard Carr released evidence that seems to confirm that the Massachusetts Democrats’ Senate candidate plagiarized at least three of her recipes submitted to the Red Indian-inspired 1984 Pow Wow Chow cookbook edited by her alleged cousin, Ms. Candy Rowsey. Two recipes appear in a 1979 article written by the esteemed Mr. Pierre Franey of the New York Times, and a third was apparently plagiarized from a 1959 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, a magazine long associated with the WASP conspiracy. Moreover, Ms. Warren on May 31 claimed her parents eloped because her pa’s parents objected to her ma’s Indian heritage. Alas, Breitbart News has obtained a copy of her parents’ marriage certificate, and they tied the knot in Oklahoma’s Methodist Episcopal Church, with the Rev. Sidney H. Babcock presiding. Ms. Warren is running against the incumbent Senator Scott Brown.

Apparently that super-secret, state-of-the-art Russian passenger plane, the Sukhoi Superjet 100, had stealth capabilities, for no sooner had it taken off on May 10 from Jakarta, Indonesia, with 50 journalists aboard than it utterly vanished from the radar screens. The next day wreckage was discovered 5,000 feet up a cliff on the Mt. Salak volcano, so we know the Superjet can reach an altitude of 5,000 feet, But who wants to fly over totally flat terrain? Cancel my order! The mishap cast a pall over Mr. Vladimir Putin’s third inauguration in Moscow, and possibly the great man will go back to shedding his shirt in public, though he is not up for reelection until 2018. In Mali, demonstrators burst into the office of the interim president, Mr. Dioncounda Traoré (pronounced Smith), and beat him ferociously, bloodying his head and knocking him unconscious, though he was otherwise unhurt. Taken to the nearby Point G Hospital, Mr. Traoré woke up smiling and singing, according to Mr. Sekou Yattara, a high-ranking medical student at the hospital. The elderly statesman will be fit as a fiddle in a matter of months and ready to resume duties. In South Africa, President Jacob Zuma dropped his legal case against the Goodman Gallery for displaying a portrait depicting his splendid set of genitals when he was reassured that they really were enormous and non-threatening. Finally, two months after the distinguished French academic Mr. Richard Descoings, the president of Paris’s Sciences Po, was found dead in his ransacked New York City hotel room, his autopsy was made available. He died of a heart attack after apparently throwing his laptop and cell phone out the window… and meeting with complete strangers whom he had encountered on a gay website.

That former high-ranking CNN executive who retired as president of CNN Headline News is apparently still at it, that is to say, distributing excrement. The exec, Mr. Bob Furnad, was charged with putting a bag of dog feces in the mailbox of his Covington, Georgia, neighbors. He claimed the “prank” was “an immature act in response to years of malicious rumor mongering that I consider defamation of character.” Mr. Furnad has also taught at the University of Georgia, probably journalism. M. Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s and former President Clinton’s influence spreads. In Ottawa, Canada, the Museum of Science and Technology is hosting a “Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition” featuring advice on anal sex for teens, the use of flavored and textured condoms, and a video screen showing animations of aroused genitals. “It very quickly became apparent to myself and my wife that this was revolting,” Mr. Patrick Meagher told a local news agency. The Crisis continues.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; The Clinton Crack-Up; and After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery.

The American Spectator Foundation is the 501(c)(3) organization responsible for publishing The American Spectator magazine and training aspiring journalists who espouse traditional American values. Your contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Each donor receives a year-end summary of their giving for tax purposes.